Tag: Perseverance

Mars on Earth: Turkish lake may hold clues to ancient life on planet

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Scientists believe that the sediments around the lake eroded from large mounds that are formed with the help of microbes

As NASA’s rover Perseverance explores the surface of Mars, scientists hunting for signs of ancient life on the distant planet are using data gathered on a mission much closer to home at a lake in southwest Turkey.

NASA says the minerals and rock deposits at Salda are the nearest match on earth to those around the Jezero Crater where the spacecraft landed and which is believed to have once been flooded with water.

Information gathered from Lake Salda may help the scientists as they search for fossilised traces of microbial life preserved in sediment thought to have been deposited around the delta and the long-vanished lake it once fed.

“Salda…will serve as a powerful analogue in which we can learn and interrogate,” Thomas Zurbuchen, NASA associate administrator for science, told Reuters.

Professor Latif Kurt of Ankara University and Umit Turan from Turkish Environment Ministry inspect the shoreline of Salda Lake in Burdur province, Turkey, March 1, 2021.

Professor Latif Kurt of Ankara University and Umit Turan from Turkish Environment Ministry inspect the shoreline of Salda Lake in Burdur province, Turkey, March 1, 2021.  
| Photo Credit:
REUTERS

A team of American and Turkish planetary scientists carried out research in 2019 on the shorelines of the lake, known as Turkey’s Maldives because of its azure water and white shores.

Scientists believe that the sediments around the lake eroded from large mounds that are formed with the help of microbes and are known as microbialites.

The team behind the Perseverance rover, the most advanced astrobiology lab ever flown to another world, wants to find out whether there are microbialites in Jezero Crater.

 

They will also compare the beach sediments from Salda with carbonate minerals — formed from carbon dioxide and water, a key ingredient for life — detected on the margins of Jezero Crater.

“When we find something at Perseverance we can go back to look at Lake Salda to really look at both processes, (looking at) similarities but equally importantly differences that are really between Perseverance and Lake Salda,” Zurbuchen said. “So we are really glad we have that lake, just because I think it will be with us for a long time”.

Samples of rock drilled from Martian soil are to be stored on the surface for eventual retrieval and delivery to Earth by two future robotic missions, as early as 2031.

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NASA’s Perseverance rover performs first test drive on Mars

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As part of its mission, the rover would characterise the Red Planet’s geology and past climate, and pave the way for human exploration of Mars.

NASA’s latest Mars rover, Perseverance, performed its first test drive on the Red Planet, covering a distance of about 6.5 metres across the Martian landscape, a “major milestone” before it begins its science operations.

The drive lasted about 33 minutes, propelling the rover forward by four metres, where it then turned to the left by 150 degrees and backed up 2.5 metres into its new temporary parking space, the American space agency noted in a statement.

According to NASA, the drive served as a mobility test to check out and calibrate every system, subsystem, and instrument on the Perseverance rover, which it said is a major milestone before the science operations get underway.

Also read | Decoded: the secret message on Mars rover’s giant parachute

“When it comes to wheeled vehicles on other planets, there are few first-time events that measure up in significance to that of the first drive,” said Anais Zarifian, the mobility test bed engineer of the Mars 2020 Perseverance rover at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Southern California.

“This was our first chance to ‘kick the tires’ and take Perseverance out for a spin. The rover’s six-wheel drive responded superbly. We are now confident our drive system is good to go, capable of taking us wherever the science leads us over the next two years,” Zarifian said.

Regular commutes of over 200 metres are expected once the rover begins pursuing its science goals, including the search for signs of ancient microbial life, NASA said.

As part of its mission, the rover would characterise the Red Planet’s geology and past climate, and pave the way for human exploration of Mars.

It is also expected to be the first to collect and cache Martian rock and soil.

Also read | Perseverance rover’s exciting work to happen in coming weeks: NASA’s Vishnu Sridhar

Since its landing on Mars on February 18, the rover has undergone several routine checks, including a a software update, replacing the computer program that helped land Perseverance with one NASA will rely on to analyse the planet.

On March 2, NASA said its engineers unstowed the rover’s 2-metre-long robotic arm for the first time, flexing each of its five joints over the course of two hours.

All the while, the space agency said the rover continues to send down images from Mars using the most advanced suite of cameras ever to travel to the Red Planet.

“Every picture from Perseverance is relayed by either the European Space Agency’s Trace Gas Orbiter, or NASA’s MAVEN, Mars Odyssey, or Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. They are important partners in our explorations and our discoveries,” said Justin Maki, chief engineer for imaging and the imaging scientist for the Mars 2020 Perseverance rover mission at JPL.

The Hindu Science Quiz | All about Mars

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NASA’s Perseverance rover makes historic Mars landing

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NASA’s science rover Perseverance, the most advanced astrobiology laboratory ever sent to another world, streaked through the Martian atmosphere on Thursday and landed safely on the floor of a vast crater, its first stop on a search for traces of ancient microbial life on the Red Planet.

Mission managers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory near Los Angeles burst into applause and cheers as radio signals confirmed that the six-wheeled rover had survived its perilous descent and arrived within its target zone inside Jezero Crater, site of a long-vanished Martian lake bed.

The robotic vehicle sailed through space for nearly seven months, covering 293 million miles (472 million km) before piercing the Martian atmosphere at 12,000 miles per hour (19,000 km per hour) to begin its approach to touchdown on the planet’s surface.

The spacecraft’s self-guided descent and landing during a complex series of maneuvers that NASA dubbed “the seven minutes of terror” stands as the most elaborate and challenging feat in the annals of robotic spaceflight.

 

“It really is the beginning of a new era,” NASA’s associate administrator for science, Thomas Zurbuchen, said earlier in the day during NASA’s webcast of the event.

The landing represented the riskiest part of two-year, $2.7 billion endeavor whose primary aim is to search for possible fossilized signs of microbes that may have flourished on Mars some 3 billion years ago, when the fourth planet from the sun was warmer, wetter and potentially hospitable to life.

Scientists hope to find biosignatures embedded in samples of ancient sediments that Perseverance is designed to extract from Martian rock for future analysis back on Earth – the first such specimens ever collected by humankind from another planet.

 

Two subsequent Mars missions are planned to retrieve the samples and return them to NASA in the next decade.

Thursday’s landing came as a triumph for a pandemic-weary United States in the grips of economic dislocation caused by the COVID-19 public health crisis.

Search for ancient life

NASA scientists have described Perseverance as the most ambitious of nearly 20 U.S. missions to Mars dating back to the Mariner spacecraft’s 1965 fly-by.

Larger and packed with more instruments than the four Mars rovers preceding it, Perseverance is set to build on previous findings that liquid water once flowed on the Martian surface and that carbon and other minerals altered by water and considered precurors to the evolution of life were present.

Perseverance’s payload also includes demonstration projects that could help pave the way for eventual human exploration of Mars, including a device to convert the carbon dioxide in the Martian atmosphere into pure oxygen.

The box-shaped tool, the first built to extract a natural resource of direct use to humans from an extraterrestrial environment, could prove invaluable for future human life support on Mars and for producing rocket propellant to fly astronauts home.

 

Another experimental prototype carried by Perseverance is a miniature helicopter designed to test the first powered, controlled flight of an aircraft on another planet. If successful, the 4-pound (1.8-kg) helicopter could lead to low-altitude aerial surveillance of distant worlds, officials said.

The daredevil nature of the rover’s descent to the Martian surface, at a site that NASA described as both tantalizing to scientists and especially hazardous for landing, was a momentous achievement in itself.

The multi-stage spacecraft carrying the rover soared into the top of Martian atmosphere at nearly 16 times the speed of sound on Earth, angled to produce aerodynamic lift while jet thrusters adjusted its trajectory.

A jarring, supersonic parachute inflation further slowed the descent, giving way to deployment of a rocket-powered “sky crane” vehicle that flew to a safe landing spot, lowered the rover on tethers, then flew off to crash a safe distance away.

Perseverance’s immediate predecessor, the rover Curiosity, landed in 2012 and remains in operation, as does the stationary lander InSight, which arrived in 2018 to study the deep interior of Mars.

Last week, separate probes launched by the United Arab Emirates and China reached Martian orbit. NASA has three Mars satellites still in orbit, along with two from the European Space Agency.

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‘Something we’ve never seen’ – Mars rover beams back selfie from moment before landing

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The image was taken at the very end of the so-called “seven-minutes-of-terror” descent sequence

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NASA scientists on Friday presented striking early images from the picture-perfect landing of the Mars rover Perseverance, including a selfie of the six-wheeled vehicle dangling just above the surface of the Red Planet moments before touchdown.

The color photograph, likely to become an instant classic among memorable images from the history of spaceflight, was snapped by a camera mounted on the rocket-powered “sky crane” descent-stage just above the rover as the car-sized space vehicle was being lowered on Thursday to Martian soil.

The image was unveiled by mission managers during an online news briefing webcast from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory(JPL) near Los Angeles less than 24 hours after the landing.

The picture, looking down on the rover, shows the entire vehicle suspended from three cables unspooled from the skycrane, along with an “umbilical” communications cord. Swirls of dust kicked up by the crane’s rocket thrusters are also visible.

 

Seconds later, the rover was gently planted on its wheels, its tethers were severed, and the sky crane – its job completed- flew off to crash a safe distance away, though not before photos and other data collected during the descent were transmitted to the rover for safe keeping.

The image of the dangling science lab, striking for its clarity and sense of motion, marks the first such close-up photo of a spacecraft landing on Mars, or any planet beyond Earth.

 

“This is something we’ve never seen before,” Aaron Stehura, a deputy lead for the mission’s descent and landing team, describing himself and colleagues as “awe-struck” when first viewing the image.

Instantly iconic

Adam Steltzner, chief engineer for the Perseverance project at JPL, said he found the image instantly iconic, comparable to the shot of Apollo 11 astronaut Buzz Aldrin standing on the moon in 1969, or the Voyager 1 probe’s images of Saturn in 1980.

He said the viewer is connected with a landmark moment representing years of work by thousands of individuals.

“You are brought to the surface of Mars. You’re sitting there, seven meters off the surface of the rover looking down,” he said. “It’s absolutely exhilarating, and it is evocative of those other images from our experience as human beings moving out into our solar system.”

The image was taken at the very end of the so-called “seven-minutes-of-terror” descent sequence that brought Perseverance from the top of Mars’ atmosphere, traveling at 12,000 miles per hour, to a gentle touchdown on the floor of avast basin called the Jezero Crater.

Next week, NASA hopes to present more photos and video — some possibly with audio — taken by all six cameras affixed tothe descending spacecraft, showing more of the sky crane maneuvers, as well as the supersonic parachute deployment that preceded it.

Pauline Hwang, strategic mission manager, said the rover itself “is doing great and is healthy on the surface of Mars, and continues to be highly functional and awesome.”

The vehicle landed about two kilometers from tall cliffs at the base of a ancient river delta carved into the corner of the crater billions of years ago, when Mars was warmer, wetter and presumably hospitable to life.

Scientists say the site is ideal for pursuing Perseverance’s primary objective — searching for fossilised traces of microbial life preserved in sediments believed to have been deposited around the delta and the long-vanished lake it once fed.

Samples of rock drilled from the Martian soil are to be stored on the surface for eventual retrieval and delivery to Earth by two future robotic missions to the Red Planet, as early as 2031.

Another color photo published on Friday, captured moments after the rover’s arrival, shows a rocky expanse of terrain around the landing site and what appear to be the delta cliffs in the distance.

The mission’s surface team will spend the coming days and weeks unfastening, unfurling and testing the vehicle’s robot arm, communication antennae and other equipment, aligning instruments and upgrading the rover’s software, Hwang said. She said it would be about nine “sols,” or Martian days,before the rover is ready for its first test spin.

One of Perseverance’s tasks before embarking on its search for signs of microbial life will be to deploy a miniature helicopter it carried to Mars for an unprecedented extraterrestrial test flight. But Hwang said that effort was still about two months away.

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